Thoughts on National Eating Disorders Awareness Week
February 26, 2008
by Martha M.
According to the National Eating Disorders Association, February 24 to March 1 is Eating Disorders Awareness Week. My own story comes to mind. Rather than go into personal detail, I would like to share what I learned in the process of recovery after 13 years of bulimarexia.
There will always be enough for me, whether it be food or love. I can say “No” to dessert or requests that demand too much of me. I can say “Yes” to dessert if I have room in my stomach, if it looks good, and if I WANT some. I do not consider that a sin. Nor do I consider it a sin to say “Yes” and do someone a favor, if I find it acceptable or within my means. Good eating is about three meals a day — a regular thing. It is not about diets or fasts. I feed my body regularly. It has come to depend on me for nurturing. In return, it gives me strength, energy, determination and the ability to pursue my dreams. I consider that a fair deal.
I have learned that eating is not about will power or discipline, neither of which I claim to have. It is about taking time for myself. I eat slowly and chew thoroughly. That allows me to enjoy food, prevents indigestion, and gives my body plenty of time to send the “satisfied” signal. Afterwards I feel good and can devote myself to other activities.
I admitted that I didn’t know how to eat, or what hunger and satiation felt like. I wanted to recover and enjoy life. In the process of recovery, it helped me to set up a basic food plan and commit myself to eating “normally” for six months, no matter what. That is a realistic alternative to the quick-fix mentality of this day and age. It doesn’t mean someone will lose a certain amount of weight in ten days, but rather, that they nourish their body and let it find its own ideal weight where it can function best. This long-term approach is life enhancing.
Recently I encountered some recovery myths in a conversation. I would like to set things straight. Now that I am healthy, I still get sad, feel lonely, screw things up, get tired, act like a child when I’m angry, don’t know everything, make mistakes. I get irritable when I’m hungry, have undesirable habits, and am still rather untidy. My marriage did not improve as drastically in the long run as I’d hoped. But I also often feel happy, enjoy spending time with people, actively pursue my hobbies and derive great pleasure through them, enjoy my children, feel energetic, enjoy a good meal, love to listen to music and read. In other words, many of the less enviable qualities have remained, but health has enriched my life incredibly. 2008 is my 20th year of health.
Last summer I published my story as told by my journals, which I have kept from the age of ten until the present. There is no one patent recipe for recovery, but through telling my story I hope to convey that full recovery is possible, and to encourage fellow sufferers to embark on their own unique path of recovery. My story is told in Diary of a Recovered Bulimic.
Martha M. grew up in upstate New York and moved to New York City and then to Europe, where she eventually recovered from bulimia, married, and started a family. She earned her master’s degree in psychology at a renowned European University. A poet and songwriter, she gives occasional concerts.
Girlfriends Gather to Celebrate Books
January 26, 2008
by Rosemary Poole-Carter
In the tiny East Texas town of Jefferson, where population is low and the illiteracy rate is high, Kathy Patrick has found her calling. Dressed in hot pink and leopard print, a tiara sparkling atop her blonde hair, Patrick broadcasts her passion for books and reading. A skilled hairdresser, as well as avid booklover and former publisher’s representative, she now runs a beauty salon/bookshop called Beauty and the Book, styling hair and filling heads with her must-read suggestions. Patrick is also founder of the Pulpwood Queens’ Book Clubs, author of The Pulpwood Queens’ Tiara-Wearing, Book-Sharing Guide to Life, and hostess of the annual Girlfriend Weekend, a literary festival for readers and writers.
This year’s Girlfriend Weekend, January 18 - 19, 2008, was a loosely organized collection of book talks, panel discussions, and parties, concluding with a night of dancing and hilarity at the Ball of Hair–where bookish types let their hair down or teased it to new heights. With infectious enthusiasm, Kathy Patrick and the Pulpwood Queens live their philosophy that reading is fun and exciting and that readers can be outrageously glamorous or plain silly when they choose.
Along with numerous American writers at the festival were Paulina Porizkova, a former supermodel and political refugee from Eastern Europe, and Kim Sunee, an orphan from South Korea, who was adopted and raised in New Orleans, then sojourned in Provence. Both spoke of escaping into books, a coping strategy for dealing with personal trials and traumas shared by nearly everyone in attendance. For many, the love of reading has led naturally to a love of writing.
A pivotal summer in Paris when Porizkova was fifteen inspired her novel, A Model Summer. A quest for identity and the comfort of food inspired Sunee to write her memoir Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home. Kathy Patrick found books transported her from a difficult early life in rural Kansas and has now made transporting and uplifting others her mission. What is particular about each reader and writer is also universal–through our reading and writing, through our sharing of ideas with one another and of the pleasures we experience in books, we find our place in the world. And once a year we can also find a warm welcome from our girlfriends in the piney woods of East Texas.
Rosemary Poole-Carter, a panelist at the ‘08 Girlfriend Weekend, presented her new novel Women of Magdalene, which is set in a 19th century ladies’ lunatic asylum
Quick as a Hot Flash: Hormonal Haiku
January 16, 2008
by Diane Saarinen
I was bewildered by my own body. It had happened over and over again in just the past three days. This prickly heat, this sensation of intense warmth, started at my chest and moved up through my throat and into my face and radiated out my head. It even happened when I slept, waking me up so I couldn’t go back to sleep.
Sunday was the worst. I had been roused into consciousness at 4:30 a.m. and spent the sunrise hours staring at my computer. The rest of the morning I was tired and in a bad mood. It dawned on me that I was having hot flashes. What was I doing with hot flashes when — yes, I did have another birthday coming soon – I am closer to 40 than to 50? Just what, I thought, were my ovaries up to?
Googling to try to find an answer, I ended up staring at books with covers like this titled Could It Be Perimenopause? Well, could it? I wondered what caused hot flashes since I had resigned myself to hot flashing for the next ten years or so. I couldn’t find the answer here. Or here. So, in other words, I was finding out that, although as many as 85 percent of women experience hot flashes, the mechanism that causes them has never been discovered!
If men had hot flashes, you know that there would be billions put into research to find the answer.
“More than the
At least I am keeping a sense of humor – for now. Awake again after another episode, I composed a haiku poem in honor of my hormonal changes.
Insolent hot flash!
Nocturnal, uninvited
I am hot and cold.
Diane Saarinen has written for numerous publications including Women’s eNews Daily and
The Mystery of the Goddess in the Shopping Cart
January 15, 2008
by Carolyn Lee Boyd
Just as feminism itself may change but will still always move forward, so does the powerful, liberating Sacred Feminine continue to come forth. I see Her emerging not only from the ground as archeologists unearth artifacts of Goddess-worshipping cultures, but turning up also in our toy chests, movie theaters, and bookstores, if we will only look.
Imagine my surprise when I passed a toy store display of Goddess Barbie dolls: a Moon Goddess, Sun Goddess, Grecian Goddess, Goddesses of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Arctic, and of Wisdom, Beauty, and Spring, all looking swell in gorgeous gowns. And recently, Disney began marketing their “fairy line,” featuring Tinkerbell. These not only have baditude (remember Tink’s temper?) but their own inner powers. If only I had had these when I was growing up!
Tia Dalma, though identified as Calypso in The Pirates of the Caribbean movies, clearly is more like the Goddess of Death and Rebirth to my mind. This ubiquitous Goddess, like Hinduism’s Kali, is deeply powerful, fierce and angry, overseeing death, life, and rebirth. Tia, trapped in a human body, is suddenly liberated at the end of the third movie. To watch her suddenly grow to giant-size and stir up a ship-crunching tempest in the land of the dead is to witness the power of this Goddess.
A Hecate-like gatekeeper Goddess seems to be in the book and movie of Bridge to Terabithia. In it, the boy Jess and his free-spirited friend Leslie create a fantasy world, Terabithia, where Jess can escape from his religiously-repressive family and narrow gender confines. Leslie eventually dies crossing to Terabithia over a river and Jess sets a crowned image of her adrift there after her death. To me, this is symbolic not only of her eternal life, but also of her roles as mediator between the everyday and other worlds and guide for Jess in his transformation.
Finally, I adore Fannie Flagg’s poignant and loving descriptions of the lives of ordinary Americans. Who would think you would find God as a woman among her small town hardware stores and old-time radio shows? But, in the novel Standing in the Rainbow, a character dies and meets Diety in the form of Neighbor Dorothy and her husband from the previous novels. Here Deity is both God and Goddess, the Divine with both a female and a male face. And Neighbor Dorothy – kind, nurturing, a parenting expert, everyone’s best friend – was quite recognizable to me even before this as a human version of the compassionate Mother Goddesses like Mary and Kwan Yin.
The mystery is how can these Goddess images emerge in popular culture with almost no one noticing? Perhaps it is because no one expects them to be in these places, and, most likely, the creators of these works were unaware of their resemblance to these ancient Goddesses. Yet, they are there, perhaps positively influencing those who play with, watch, or read them. To me, it is comforting to see these Goddess-like figures, a clue that perhaps my way of being is not so out of touch with the mainstream. But, perhaps they are also a back door to a kind of feminism for women who find it difficult to identify themselves as such. Perhaps they are a special path for some women to begin to think of themselves as spiritually powerful. Goddess does, indeed, work in mysterious ways.
Carolyn Lee Boyd writes stories, poems, memoirs, and other pieces for feminist and women’s spirituality publications including SageWoman, The Beltane Papers, Matrifocus, The We’Moon Calendar, and Moondance. Her novel, The Temple of the Subway Goddess, is scheduled for publication by Creatrix Books in the Spring of 2009. You are invited to read more of her writings and keep up with what’s new with her at her blogsite, http://Goddessinateapot.wordpress.com.
Like a Stepchild
January 7, 2008
by Diane Saarinen
This past December, well into the holidaze season, my husband and I received tickets to Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline playing at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center here in New York. It is a play of “strange chance,” a romance, and, ultimately, a kind of screwball tragicomedy. Phylicia Rashad rules as a queen and – what else – a wicked stepmother. She is even outfitted in “wicked-looked headgear,” according to a New York Times reviewer, just in case anyone misses this characterization. From Cinderella, who toils away while her stepsisters plan what they will wear to the ball, to the German fairy tale where a poorly-treated stepdaughter serendipitously meets Mother Holle at the bottom of a well, and even to Bob Dylan who complained that “you treat me like a stepchild,” stepmothers have gotten a bad rap. As a stepmother myself, I say “Enough with the stereotypes already. We’ve had enough!”
My stepson Steven (not his real name, as I’ll give him some privacy here) came into my life ten years ago when he was 13. My husband and I had started dating earlier that year; I had heard all about Steven. But it wasn’t until the Christmas holidays that I met him because he lived in Florida with his mother while we lived in New York. Was I nervous meeting him? Not really. And I don’t think he was that nervous, either. Maybe we just knew on some level that we were going to be, well, family.
Even though I don’t have biological children, I somehow missed the Baby Gene. You know, the one that caused some friends of mine to, in their mid-thirties, take the plunge and have children they weren’t necessarily financially prepared for or that the foundations of their relationships didn’t quite support. I thought it was great that my future husband had a son. I felt this was a way that I could be a parent without being, you know, a parent. Maybe I’m just aware of my limitations, but I never felt that motherhood was really a doable option for me.
I once had lunch with a literary agent and, after we had exhausted all my ideas for books, our conversation turned to men. She said, with a great deal of finality, “I will not date a man who has children.” I was surprised at this. I also noted that she was whittling down her chances as well – wasn’t finding a man around her own age, in his 40s or 50s, without children a relatively rare occurrence?
For the record, I love my stepson. I never felt I had to play mom or buy his affection or play any particular role other than myself in relating to him. I hope he sees me as someone older than he is who is helpful, someone who doesn’t particularly care if he remembers me on Mother’s Day because I am not his mother. His mother has done a perfectly good job of raising him into a responsible adult. And though you can’t say his mother and I are friendly, we are not un-friendly. The truth is, she refuses to call my husband on our phone at home and will only call him on the cell phone. I just chalk this up to her issues and not mine, and think of the many potential arguments that this has allowed us to sidestep.
Steven’s relatives must buy into the wicked stepmother bit because, when they meet me, they like to tell me how well Steven speaks of me. Of course he does! I can truthfully say I have never behaved “wickedly” towards him. And Steven continues to live his life in a way that makes me proud to be his stepmother. Could it really be any other way?
Diane Saarinen has written for numerous publications including Women’s eNews Daily and Quiet Mountain: New Feminist Essays.
Women in Chant: A CD Review
December 22, 2007
by Diane Saarinen
As we are coming up on Christmas, it seems Women In Chant: The Announcement of Christmas by the Choir of Benedictine Nuns of the Abbey of Regina Laudis is an excellent choice of music to accompany the season. The choir, under the direction of Mother Abbess David Serna, O.S.B., begins the Announcement of Christmas with chants for Advent all the way through to Epiphany.
These are Gregorian chants that are sung as acts of prayer rather than performances. Regina Laudis is a monastery of contemplative women; a land-based community. Their foundress and first abbess, Mother Benedict Duss, insisted on continuing with Gregorian chant when other monasteries were experimenting with different types of musical expression. “I had an intuitive conviction that the Chant had the power to communicate the life of God as no other music does,” she said.
The enhanced CD, available through Sounds True, comes as a set with a digital booklet that includes translations of the Latin chants as well as photographs of the nuns. “Images of Advent awaken us to a deep and ancient sense of expectancy,” says the accompanying text, while “the vigil of Christmas, December 24, brings us to the hushed still point when the expectation gives way to reality.” Not surprisingly, the chants evolve from understated prayer to exuberant celebration throughout the course of The Announcement of Christmas.
The highlight of this work is “The Women of the Genealogy”, to whom the nuns dedicated this CD: “Their stories of courage and their tenacious drive to meet God in the line of sacred history challenged and inspired us, and anchored us throughout this work.” In the Genealogy, the names of the lineage of Jesus are recited, and, though this succession is predominantly male, the names of five women stand out: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and Mary.
A dramatic photograph of the nuns is included of the Genealogy being chanted by candlelight with, according to the medieval custom, the nun who is the book bearer kneeling down with the book placed on her head before the singing Abbess. Also included in the digital book is a summary of the story of each of these five women, told by the women of the community of Regina Laudis.
The triumph of the women of the Geneaology is summed up: “These women from different lands and nations each represent an improbable, unconventional, and ultimately miraculous leap forward in the line of succession. They are all in some way cast off by others and have the boldness to claim their own legitimacy when they are regarded as outside the law.” It is the choir’s triumph that they have subtly spotlighted these women while continuing with seasonal tradition.
Diane Saarinen’s writings have been seen in numerous publications including Women’s eNews Daily and Quiet Mountain: New Feminst Essays.
Still Fighting for the Women’s Room
December 12, 2007
by Diane Saarinen
While I do occasionally blog in the Her Circle Ezine Blogging Circle, I am also the moderator. I coordinate other bloggers’ posts according to the calendar, and on occasional scout out fellow bloggers.
HCE has a mission: Her Circle Ezine has a decidedly political slant and we actively seek creative works that incorporate women’s socio-political issues into the narrative. Therefore, the content of our blogs will work to promote these themes by highlighting historical and contemporary creative works, thereby furthering our mission to generate awareness for women’s socio-political issues and supporting female artists.
One way we would like to support female artists is to provide a woman-only space for us to safely express ourselves. Misty Ericson, publisher and editor, and I have discussed that men have had their own men-only spaces for centuries and as an international feminist ezine/magazine, we would continue to search out representations of the feminine experience — as experienced by women.
A male acquaintance, who we will call Jeff, began asking questions about the new blog I was coordinating.
“It’s for an international feminist literary magazine,” I said.
“Oh! I always wanted to write from the guy’s side for a woman’s magazine. I used to read my sister’s Tiger Beat and Glamour and wanted to be like that column, “Jake - A Man’s Opinion.”
“But it’s really not that kind of magazine,” I said. Perhaps if he had checked out the link I had provided him, he might have known that.
“But I can write as a woman. I can write under a woman’s pseudonym. I want to be one of the bloggers.”
This seemed ridiculous to me. Jeff had never struck me particularly as feminist. Why would we have a so-called feminist blogging, when it was in fact a man writing under a female pseudonym? Were we so desperate for bloggers that we would try to pull the wool over the collective eyes of our readership? Of course not! I found his request frankly amusing, even silly. I told him, perhaps condescendingly in retrospect, that for now we were “no boys allowed,” but that I would check with Misty in any case.
Misty and I decided that there would no men writing under female pseudonyms in this blog.
I didn’t know quite how to tell Jeff that his plans were thwarted. “No male writers” sounded hostile — as well as so final. Perhaps we would have male writers some day. But for the female pseudonym? I simply decided to tell him “Sorry, no boy bloggers.”
That gave way to a side of Jeff I had not seen before. Snidely, he wrote in an email: “Congratulations, you’ve managed not only to be sexist but racist in the same sentence.” For further clarification, he mentioned that African-Americans would take offense at the use of “boy.” Jeff is Italian.
“Sexist, racist, anti-gay, fill-in-the-blank go away” went the protest chant. I wondered how he did not somehow deduce that I was against homosexuals while he was at it.
I thought about feminists as sexists and research proved that it was hardly an original accusation. In the f word , Catherine Redfern has this response to the same insult hurled at her:
“You can just imagine the guy’s thought pattern as he sits tapping away at his keyboard: ‘She’s a feminist; feminists are against sexism. I’ll call HER sexist! Hoisted by her own petard… Hah ha! Oh, I’m so clever! I bet she’ll never have heard this one before.’”
Later, I had a short conversation with Jeff. I mentioned my supposedly being sexist. We were on the phone now. He wasn’t able to hide behind email. Just as he would never be able to hide behind a female pseudonym.
“I was kidding. You know that. I was kidding.”
Very funny.
And I knew he had still never once checked out the link to HCE as well.
Mary Moody Emerson: Giving “High Counsels” to Women Still
November 26, 2007
by Carolyn Lee Boyd
Mary Moody Emerson was a New England philosopher living from 1774 to 1863. Only now is her place as an inventor of American Transcendentalism and model for independent women being acknowledged through such works as Phyllis Cole’s Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. She is also an inspiration to modern women seeking new ways of being and perceiving themselves.
Mary’s biography shows how women of her time functioned effectively in community. When her father died in the American Revolution, Mary was sent to nearby relatives, beginning life in a series of households of women who came together to cope with widowhood, motherhood and raising children, poverty, and illness. Mary raised and tutored children, nursed young and old through serious illnesses, and assisted in raising money through home-based businesses, all in households run by women.
At the same time, she forged for herself an uncommonly independent life. She chose not to marry. She owned a farm, but usually preferred the freedom of living as a boarder elsewhere. She largely ignored decorum and was not always popular for speaking her mind and for her eccentric ways, such as wearing a shroud and sleeping in a coffin-shaped bed to welcome death.
She considered her “home” to be her journals in which she wrote the largely spiritual thoughts used, sometimes word for word, by her nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his Transcendentalist works. In correspondence and conversation she gave what Ralph called “high counsel” to young people, encouraging the girls to as incisive intellectual rigor as the boys. Just as she was part of women’s domestic communities, so she also formed intellectual communities among women through exchanges of journals, letters and meetings.
She was a woman of her time and her thoughts reflect its religious morays. She could be quite traditional and she would most likely disagree with much of current feminist spiritual thought. Yet, the spiritual connection she felt to the Earth and her desire was for a direct relationship between her own sacred soul and the Divine was, in its way, forward-thinking and might seem familiar to today’s women’s spirituality practitioners.
Mary lived in a time of transition between Puritan and Victorian societies as do we as we chart our way towards a 21st century global civilization. Her life gives many concrete lessons for women wishing to live effectively: solve problems through women’s communities, abjure social obligations for greater freedom, and mentor younger women. She also brought the best of the past into the present by creating women’s intellectual communities, as well as envisioning the future through letting her mind roam free to catch the impulse towards Transcendental and modern spiritual thought. But perhaps her best advice for women on untrodden paths is simply to always be true to yourself. Mary deeply influenced those around her and the world for generations to come by knowing who she was and expressing her ideas and values forthrightly in her own way. May we all have the courage to do the same.
Sources:
Battiste, Janice. A Good Aunt Is More than a Patron: Mary Moody Emerson, a Model of Self-Reliance. Women in Life and Literacy Assembly, Vol. 5, Fall, 1996. Available from: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/old-WILLA/fall96/Battiste.html.
Cole, Phyllis. Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Mary Moody Emerson (Eulogy). Paper read before the “Woman’s Club” in Boston in 1869 under the title “Amita.” Available from: http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/mme.html.
Carolyn Lee Boyd writes stories, poems, memoirs, and other pieces for feminist and women’s spirituality publications including SageWoman, The Beltane Papers, Matrifocus, The We’Moon Calendar, and Moondance. Her novel, The Temple of the Subway Goddess, is scheduled for publication by Creatrix Books in the Spring of 2009. You are invited to read more of her writings and keep up with what’s new with her at her blogsite, http://Goddessinateapot.wordpress.com
A Look at Lucia
October 31, 2007
by Diane Saarinen
Throughout the month of October, the International Museum of Women’s “Imaging Ourselves” online exhibition hosted a film festival featuring original films by women directors. As my heritage is Scandinavian, I was especially interested in Maja Borg’s Look at Lucia, a 52-minute film on the Swedish celebration of Santa Lucia, the festival held at dawn every December 13.
Perhaps instrumental in discovering how this tradition has become so strongly woven in the fabric of Swedish culture is the understanding that in the winter months, this northern country receives very little light. The image of a “Queen of Light” visiting each household — bearing a breakfast tray of Lucy cats and glogg (a hot spiced wine beverage), dressed in white and wearing a crown of candles upon her head — becomes a powerful beacon of hope in a country that is essentially plunged in darkness for many hours of the day. Of note, in the Julian calendar, the date December 13 was originally the winter solstice — the shortest day of the year.
Borg’s film focuses on the Swedish city of Norrköping as it readies for the holiday season. Children learning about Lucia sit spellbound as their teacher relates a story about a woman with beautiful eyes who attracted a suitor whom she did not want to marry. Lucia, the teacher says, wanted to give her dowry to the poor, and tore out her own eyes so that she would no longer be desirable. Concluding her story, the teacher offers a sharp reminder that Lucia was sent to a whorehouse, and ultimately killed by having a sword pierced through her throat.
How this tale of a Sicilian saint travels to Scandinavia to become a firmly-rooted tradition is unknown. Borg focuses on the disparity of the gruesome tale of the woman who did not want to marry and how, through time, this becomes distorted in what many believe is merely a beauty pageant where blonde teenage girls vie to be the city’s Lucia. Borg skillfully shifts focus between current adolescent Lucia candidates: an 86-year-old woman whose fondest memory is of when she was crowned the city’s first Lucia; and even a drag queen who manages to become Lucia, as well as testimony to the endurance of this festival in modern Swedish culture.
“It is a real happening for people here,” the organizer of the Lucia festival says. And sixty-seven years later, elderly folks still recognize the city’s first Lucia, Gun Alf. The Lucia candidates find they must participate in a walk-the-runway fashion event and maintain: “They are trying to convince everyone that this really isn’t a beauty competition…of course, it’s a beauty competition.” Still, even jaded grungy teenagers speak of celebrating December 13. In the end, Lucia, in her white-clad purity, appears to win out over seasonal commercialism and sexist stereotypes.
Diane Saarinen’s work has appeared in many publications, including Women’s eNews Daily, Quiet Mountain: New Feminist Essays, and several Finnish-American journals and newspapers.
